The following will be of interest to adult retailers, adult cabarets, and related businesses, particularly those in Maryland. Yesterday, the Pack Shack, which is a Maryland adult retailer, filed a request for Maryland's highest court to hear an appeal from a terrible lower Court decision upholding Howard County, Maryland's zoning laws that force adult businesses into out-of-reach industrial zones.

I hope and expect that the Maryland Court of Appeals will permit an appeal to be filed from this terrible decision of the Maryland Court of Special Appeals, which now has the force of law throughout the state Of Maryland.

With the Md. Court of Special Appeals' Pack Shack zoning decision, we are seeing one of the horrendous hydra-headed results of the U.S. Supreme Court's April 2000 ERIE v. PAP'S decision. In Erie v. Pap's, The Supreme Court upheld Erie, Pennsylvania's ordinance mandating pasties and G-strings on exotic dancers. Erie v. Pap's goes beyond this limited holding to enable a whole host of limitations on adult entertainment through a claim -- even a thin claim -- of negative secondary effects from the adult entertainment that's involved. With this Orwellian climate, challenges to negative secondary effects studies become a necessary weapon in the arsenal of adult businesses.

The Maryland Court of Appeals frequently reverses the Court of Special Appeals. Let's hope for such a reversal of the Court of Special Appeals' Pack Shack decision.

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